Here at the Supernova tech innovation conference, speaker Craig Newmark (the Craig in Craigslist) was wandering around with a network administrator, testing the main room's wireless connection (so he could write this blog post). All day at Supernova, attendees have suffered the most common conference headache — a wifi network that almost works. This is what they should have done:

  1. Get a real ISP for a sponsor. AT&T proved here that it can't handle the job.
  2. Know how people will choke your network. At a gamer conference, if you're lucky, everyone will be on World of Warcraft — a bandwidth sipper that runs on dialup speeds. At a vlogging conference, the upload traffic will choke in minutes. And at Supernova, broadcasting through high-bandwidth virtual world Second Life invites constant hogging, both up and down.
  3. Build a firewall. A last resort, but it kills Bittorrent use.
  4. Hand out EVDO cards. Let everyone choke Sprint instead.

To be fair, Supernova's wifi earns points for having any working wifi at all. After the jump, see what they did right.

  1. Split the network into several SSIDs. Segment the network so it doesn't get choked by multicast.
  2. Warn attendees. Remind everyone at the conference — every few hours — to shut down Bittorrent, save the World Cup watching for the bar TV, and chill out on the iTunes streaming.
  3. In an emergency, kick it up a notch. In the late morning, Supernova added two extra access points. Way to adapt!